Spending Time in Another World:
A Reader’s Profile and Journal
Corrina McGill
LIS 9382
Instructor: Sharron Smith
Due: Monday, August 1, 2011
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Reader Profile
Looking back over the record I have kept this semester of the books I have read, I am
somewhat surprised at the contents. I would usually label myself primarily a science-fiction and
fantasy fan, with a heavy emphasis on media-related tie-ins, and with the occasional foray into
mysteries (and romances when I want to turn my brain off). Between May 9 and August 1, I have
read 48 books—I exclude from this count anything read online, magazines, graphic novels,
newspapers, essays, and individual short stories, but include novels, novellas, and books of short
stories. While the science-fiction, fantasy, mystery, and romance genres are represented in the
list, it also contains several works of classic literature, popular fiction, children’s literature,
biography, chick lit, comedy, and horror (see Appendix). Some of the works were required
reading for classes—in particular, the classical literature was read for a literary appreciation
class, although I have read several of the works before. However I am still a bit surprised at the
breadth of my own reading tastes. I rarely keep track of how many books I read or in what
genres, so this was an interesting experiment. I am also somewhat surprised at the low number of
books read for three months time—I can only excuse myself by saying that I was extremely
busy, and that I should watch less television. When I was young, and not allowed to go the
library by myself, I read absolutely everything that I could get my hands on just to have
something new to read because I was desperate not to be bored. Now that I can drive, and have
access to infinite amounts of new reading material on the internet, I have the ability to indulge
my specific tastes more. I have read a great many new books this semester as opposed to only
rereading books that I already own and have read, although some of the books on the list are
rereads. I consider it the mark of a good book if I can reread it several times and still think of
new things that I haven’t noticed before.
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With regard to appeal factors, I most strongly favour character, followed by story. I pay
less attention to language, because anything too elaborate I find slows down the story and I get
bored. I also rarely read for setting on its own, though I will read a book with an interesting plot
set in a certain place and time. However, my favourites are almost always intelligent, spirited,
witty, independent Characters, with a capital ‘C’. I don’t like events that happen to characters—I
like to see how characters react to events.
With regard to performing reader’s advisory services, I think I need to keep in mind that
some people do read for setting or language, and familiarize myself more with these elements.
Since I read for character, that is what I primarily notice about a work. A setting has to be very
strong before I notice it. While I originally read the Libertus mysteries by Rosemary Rowe, such
as The Germanicus Mosaic, because of the setting in Roman-occupied Briton, I pay more
attention to the culture and customs of the time and the people, rather than the actual place in
Glevum and in the countryside.
Reader Journal
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. London: Penguin Popular Classics, 1994. Print.
I read this book for my literary appreciation class, although I have read it before several
times. However, it has been several years since my last reading, and the details have faded in my
mind. I remember it being an interesting enough story, primarily an old-fashioned romance, with
a few clever lines. However, upon this rereading, I thought it was quite funny and witty. I liked
Elizabeth Bennet more than I did the last time I read it—she is intelligent, independent, and she
gets most of the best lines in the book. These are qualities that appeal to the nerd-girl in me. I
also had more sympathy for Mr. Darcy—he may have been proud and prejudiced and roundly
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disliked, but he did have what he believed were excellent reasons for some of his actions. I liked
Mr. Bennet—I enjoy his sense of humour, such as when he says to his wife “I have a high
respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with
consideration these twenty years at least” (6). Mr. Bennet gets most of the good lines that
Elizabeth does not, and I do like witty dialogue. It’s most of the reason that I watch The X-Files,
Supernatural, and anything that Joss Whedon does. That said, there are also long speeches and
descriptions that, while common to works from the time period, are less common in more
modern works and occasionally get a little dull and make the action of the story drag. This slow
pacing of the story is part of the reason I am generally not particularly fond of literature from the
19th century.
I also noticed when rereading the book that the general silliness of many of the characters
and the overwhelming and universal preoccupation with marriage and social status that infuses
the novel is somewhat less irritating than it used to be. I have taken more classes in history and
women’s studies since the last time that I read it, and I can be more sympathetic to this
worldview instead of wondering why they can’t just go get jobs and be useful—for the time
period, the Bennet daughters literally couldn’t do anything useful with their lives, other than
marry well and produce male heirs for estates.
Austen, Jane, and Seth Grahame-Smith. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Philadelphia:
Quirk Books, 2009. Print.
I have heard reviews that this was a good book, and I have been wanting to read it for
awhile. Having recently read the original version of Pride and Prejudice, and since I found it on
the bargain shelves at Chapters, I decided to purchase and read it. One of the books on my
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reading list was Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, also by Seth Grahame-Smith, which is
written as a pseudo-factual biography of Lincoln, supposedly based on his lost journals, in which
he fights vampires in between his political deeds. I didn’t particularly enjoy Lincoln because I
thought the pace was too slow and the language was too formal. However, I enjoyed Pride and
Prejudice and Zombies much more. The story has the world, and England in particular, overrun
with the plague of unmentionables, which constantly attack the living in search of brains. The
Bennet girls have been trained in the fighting arts by Chinese warrior monks, and have sworn a
blood oath to the king to destroy zombies until such time as they marry. The book cleverly
combines a more modern action story with the traditional romance, and frequently uses lines
from the original, both unchanged and altered. For example, the famous first line, which is
quoted on the back cover of both books in each appropriate version, “It is a truth universally
acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” has
been changed to “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains
must be in want of more brains.”
The pace is much quicker, even though the story is approximately the same length and
very similar events occur in both books. What I find particularly interesting is how logical the
new version of the story is. In the original, society considers it appropriate for young women of a
certain social status to learn how to embroider and sing—in the new version, society considers it
appropriate for young ladies to behead zombies and rip the still-beating heart from a ninja and
take a delicate bite of the delicacy. It really makes more sense for Mr. Darcy to dissuade Mr.
Bingley from Jane Bennet because he is afraid she might have the zombie plague, rather than
from a sense of the lowness of Jane’s relations, though that is still named as a lesser factor in his
reasoning. There is a great deal of graphic violence in the new version, and a few mentions of
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sex, mostly related to Mr. Wickham’s poor behaviour in ringing up debts and leaving various
housemaids with bastards, but it is not what I personally would consider to be excessive or
gratuitous. Frankly, I see the violence as rather funny, especially since it is so well blended with
the romantic comedy and confusion.
Fisher, Carrie. Wishful Drinking. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008. Print.
I have heard of this book before, but never got around to reading it. However, Carrie
Fisher recently brought her one-woman show which inspired the book to Toronto, and my
mother has a spare ticket that I promptly claimed (it’s Princess Leia!), so I decided to read the
book before going to see the show. The book is a humorous retelling of the author’s life,
focussing on her battles with drug addiction and mental illness, and her relationships with friends
and family, and of course how George Lucas ruined her life with that stupid hairstyle (as she puts
it). Fisher is terrifically funny and brutally honest about things that must have caused her a great
deal of pain, and she has a gift for a well-turned phrase. As she sums up her life, “If my life
wasn’t funny, it would just be true, and that is unacceptable” (17).
The book consists of several long anecdotes, rather than a sequential recital of her life.
She skips around from the gay friend who died in her bed, to the scandal of her father’s affair
with Elizabeth Taylor and her parents’ divorce, to her own marriage and divorce from Paul
Simon, to not being allowed to wear underwear in Star Wars, to the existence of a Princess Leia
sex doll (she finds it amusing to be told to go fuck herself, since she says she can), to being
diagnosed as bipolar and having electroconvulsive therapy, to the birth of her daughter, to her
addiction to prescription medicine, to her desperate wish to forget her holographic speech
pleading with Obi-Wan Kenobi to rejoin the war against the Empire. The book is liberally filed
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with personal snapshots and studio press images and real newspaper headlines, as well as two
full pages of a photo-diagram of what she calls Hollywood inbreeding, explaining the many
marriages, divorces, affairs, and scandals that relate to her extended family.
The language is extremely graphic, as is the subject matter, but Fisher can be admired for
her blunt honesty about topics that some people would likely not want to discuss in such a public
forum. I would recommend this book to Star Wars fans, fans of comedy or biographies, people
who like to hear about Hollywood and celebrities, or people interested in stories about
addictions.
Incidentally, the show was terrific, and the material stayed fairly close to the book, and I
was fast enough after the show to get the only (personalised!) autograph in my book before she
left the theatre.
Roberts, Nora. Genuine Lies. New York: Bantam Books, 1991. Print.
My mother, aunt, cousins, and grandmothers are all addicted to romance novels and swop
them constantly, so growing up there was always a pile of them in the house (literally, since
there was no room left on the shelves for all mom’s books). I began reading them at a young age
simply for the sake of something new to read, since the local library could not keep up with me.
While by and large I find the plots excessively predictable and am often offended by the helpless
heroines common to older novels, I still sometimes indulge when I want to read something
completely mindless—generally when I have read too many academic essays for school where
the author’s main point was to show-off how many polysyllabic words they knew, instead of
clearly and concisely explaining their thesis and arguments. I find the utter predictability of
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romance novels to be relaxing—I call them potato chips for the brain, since they are so easily
and quickly devoured.
I appreciate how prolific Nora Roberts is—her stories are uncomplicated, but solidly told,
and generally very similar to her other stories so you always know what you get, in addition to
the conventions of the genre. Genuine Lies is a standalone novel, as opposed to her habit of
following the romantic relationships of a family or a group of friends in a series of novels. More
specifically, it is a romantic suspense story—the rich, famous, respected, and eccentric movie
star Eve Benedict hires a single-mother biographer to write her honest life’s story, and many
people in her life are afraid that she intends to spill their secrets, which of course she does. The
biographer is in fact Eve’s long-lost daughter via her married lover, given up for adoption at
birth, and who falls in love with Eve’s stepson. Eve is murdered, and her daughter is the chief
suspect, and they must find the real killer and find out the last of Eve’s secrets. The novel
contains both sex and violence, but it is not unusually graphic for the genre. While the romantic
couple Julia and Paul are fairly standard romance characters, Eve is a fascinating and larger than
life figure. By turns generous, demanding, precise, loving, selfish, honest, glamorous, vicious,
and proud, Eve is meant to be a portrait of an old-school Hollywood actress, a true star of the
kind we no longer see. She name-drops famous Hollywood actors throughout history, making it
an interesting read for anyone interested in classic Hollywood. Eve would be a very
uncomfortable person to live with, but she is a fascinating character to read about.
Carter, Timothy. Evil? Woodbury, Minnesota: Llewellyn Publications, 2009. Print.
Timothy Carter is a friend from local science fiction conventions, and I generally buy his
latest book when I see him. Evil? is my favourite of his works. It is a young adult novel about
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Stuart, a gay teenager living in an extremely religious small town in Northern Ontario. Stuart’s
hobby is summoning a demon named Fon Pyre who tells him God’s real opinions on human
behaviour, such as the fact that he really doesn’t care about homosexuality, that there’s nothing
wrong with birth control, that there will never be a Rapture, and that The Golden Compass is a
pretty good read (31). However, an angel is cast down from Heaven for disagreeing with God
about how to treat humans, and stirs up trouble by convincing all nearby humans to be violently
and irrationally prejudiced against his particular hatred—the sin of Onan. Stuart is thrown out of
his home for being a ‘spiller,’ and when he and other teenagers try to take refuge with the
moderate priest they are violently attacked. The angel even inspires Stuart’s own mother to try to
kill him for his perceived sin. Stuart and his friends must try to break the hold the angel has on
the townsfolk before they get lynched by the mob of religious fanatics.
What I find interesting about the book is the fact that religion, and Christianity in
particular, is not shown as being wrong, only strict religious fanaticism and fundamentalism. The
priest explains that the general interpretation of the sin of Onan, which is based on a specific
story in the Bible, is wrong because people do not properly understand the culture that the book
was written in, and they are resistant to being told that there is another interpretation of their
beliefs. It illustrates the dangers of prioritizing strict adherence to impersonal religion over
rational independent thought and concern for your loved ones, no matter what they might do that
you disapprove of. The subject of the book is very controversial, and there are moments of
juvenile humour, such as when Fon Pyre mockingly lists off slang terms for the sin Stuart
doesn’t want to properly name: “The sound of one hand clapping? Going single player on the
joystick? Reloading the shotgun?” (29)
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Buckley, Christopher. Supreme Courtship. New York: Twelve, 2008. Print.
Christopher Buckley is the author of Thank You for Smoking, which was made into a
movie several years ago which I highly enjoy. I found this book and Boomsday on the bargain
shelf at Chapters. When the United States Senate keeps rejecting the President’s candidates for
the Supreme Court, he chooses a popular reality courtroom show judge, Pepper Cartwright, with
the idea that she is so popular that the Senate will be unable to turn her down. Judge Pepper is
reminiscent of Judge Judy, in her no-nonsense attitude and her creative sentences that let the
punishment fit the crime. The President is also determined not to be re-elected, because he
believes that he fixed everything that he wanted to fix. Unfortunately, the other candidates are so
obviously bad that he can’t just quit and not run again and let the country he just fixed go to pot.
Buckley has the same gift as many British humour writers, who take a simple idea and
run with it to the logical extreme, no matter how absurd it may seem to be on the surface. He
manages to take detailed court cases and legal vocabulary and make them real and important and
funny, such as when the judge who cast the deciding vote to legalize gay marriage finds out that
his wife has left him for another woman. The language is sometimes very graphic, such as when
the PR guy has to leave instructions regarding the presidential candidate, saying “Don’t let him
call the President of the United States a cocksucker on national television” (253), after the
candidate repeatedly (and somewhat uncreatively) calls
the President a “MotherFucker,
Cocksucking motherfucking cocksucker...” (251) for two pages. While I prefer Buckley’s other
works for the topics (Thank You for Smoking is about a tobacco lobbyist justifying his work
spinning how tobacco is good for you, and Boomsday is a version of Swift’s A Modest Proposal,
about how the aging Baby Boomer population should do their duty to their country and kill
themselves in order to relieve the burden on the national debt), I very much enjoy the way that
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the central characters of his books know perfectly well that they are ridiculous and outrageous
and not entirely serious, but the conflict of the books happens when very silly people take a silly
idea seriously. It provides an entertaining and satirical look at popular culture and society, as The
Simpsons used to do in their prime.
Irvine, Alex. Supernatural: John Winchester’s Journal. New York: itbooks, 2011. Print.
This book is meant to serve as a supplement to the television show Supernatural, which I
recently started watching (okay, marathoning). It is a prequel to the series, told in the form of the
journal of John Winchester, the demon-hunting father of the two main characters, the brothers
Dean and Sam Winchester. John’s journal is shown many times throughout the first few seasons
of the show, since the brothers constantly use it as a reference source when they are hunting
monsters and trying to find their father who has disappeared. The story is told by John, of the
revelation that his wife was murdered by a demon, that demons exist, his quest to find and kill
the murderer, and his attempts to raise his boys on the road as hunters, to follow in his footsteps.
The entries are dated and told in the first person. The journal spans from 1983 to 2005, and John
begins with his story and his feelings, his pain and confusion and his love for his sons, his desire
for vengeance, but as time passes and he becomes more and more obsessed his personal
observations get fewer and farther between and his records of his research and the monsters he
has hunted and killed increase. Eventually his personal remarks become perfunctory, and he
makes only brief notes on significant dates such as his wedding anniversary, his sons’ birthdays,
and most importantly the anniversary of his wife’s death.
While the paperback does not physically resemble the leather-bound loose-leaf journal
used on the show, it does mention several incidents from the show. The book includes sketches
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and photographs, handwritten notes, newspaper articles, and typed entries to make it look more
hand-created. It includes a great deal of research and reference material on various monsters,
demons, magic spells, superstitions, and urban legends, which are hallmarks of the television
show. It even includes the complete text of the exorcism ritual used on the show, written in
Latin.
As a standalone story, the book does not hold up well, particularly as the research
sections grow larger and more frequent. I found that John became a very unsympathetic
character as time passed, he wrote less about himself and he became more obsessed about
avenging his long-dead wife than caring for his living children. However, as a supplement to the
television show, it does work well, by reproducing many of the details of John’s journal. This
would be an excellent book for people who watch the show and want to read the same thing that
Dean and Sam are reading in its entirety, instead of the snippets they quote in the show.
Goldsmith, Olivia. The First Wives Club. New York: Pocket Books, 1992. Print.
I first read this book because I enjoy the movie—it is a fun story of revenge and female
friendship. However, I was interested though not terribly surprised to learn that the book is
actually quite different. It contains a great deal more sex and harsh language, Brenda becomes a
lesbian instead of reuniting with her husband, and Annie’s developmentally challenged daughter
is not mentioned in the movie. The women are more despairing, and the men are more
despicable. However, the determination of the women to reclaim their pride and dignity from the
self-important men who used them for their youth and beauty and wealth and strength and
support and then tried to cast them aside in favour of younger, newer models is just as
entertaining and admirable and inspiring. The book is slightly dated now in terms of popular
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culture, but I still enjoy it a great deal. The book is very emotional, and it may be controversial to
some readers—there is strong language, infidelity, alcoholism, an affair with an under aged girl,
lies, and a father embezzles from his mentally handicapped daughter’s trust fund in order to
commit fraud and insider trading. However, it is a very interesting look at these women’s lives—
it is what happens to the girls from Sex and the City in thirty years, except that The First Wives
Club came first. In fact, Sarah Jessica Parker appears in the movie as the new blonde trophy wife
of one of the husbands. This book is chick lit, but it is not mindless or fluffy. It deals with serious
problems that face ‘women of a certain age’ in that particular part of society—New York upper
crust, where appearances mean so much more than reality. While the location of New York, and
the trip to Japan, is emphasized, the book is primarily driven by the characters.
Willis, Connie. To Say Nothing of the Dog. New York: Bantam Books, 1998. Print.
I found this book at the library, after hearing it mentioned in class as a funny science
fiction book. It is about time travellers under the tyrannical hand of Lady Schrapnell, who is
determined that her recreation of the cathedral at Coventry be as precisely correct in every single
detail as is completely inhumanly impossible. It focuses on the exhausted Ned Henry, historian,
sent on a never-ending quest for the bishop’s bird stump, seen during the Victorian era but
mysteriously gone missing during the Blitz in the 1940s. Ned becomes entangled with a
Victorian family, a fellow time traveller slash water nymph named Verity Kindle, a cat named
Princess Arjumand, her baby-talking owner Tossie, a lovesick student named Terence, and his
dog, Cyril.
While I can see how the book tried to be funny, and it does have humorous moments,
overall it fails in my opinion. The time travel device is not explained clearly near the start of the
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book, and the explanation that is given is confusing. Everyone is obsessed with the bishop’s bird
stump, without really explaining what it is or why the mysterious and determined Lady
Schrapnell wants it. Ned is sent to the past because he is completely exhausted, and keeps
complaining that all he wants is a good week’s sleep, but he remains quite active and never
collapses as he should is he is truly that tired. He only has moments of confused thinking which
are convenient to the plot. In addition, the author repeatedly shoehorns in the title of the book,
apparently a quotation of some sort, at every opportunity, with the result of making it quite
tiresome. Ned’s confusion and comments regarding Victorian society and customs, and his
dislike of jumble sales can be amusing, but all proper explanations are techno-babbled out at the
end and the happy ending is forced and rushed. Few of the secondary characters have any depth,
and Ned spends most of his time worrying. I think this book would actually make a better
movie—the visualization would help the storytelling, and the needs of the format to make the
story clear to the average viewer might help tighten it.
Appendix
List of Books Read between May 9-August 1, 2011
1. Naked Heat by Richard Castle
2. Supreme Courtship by Christopher Buckley
3. Sword & Sorceress VII edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley
4. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
5. Jingo by Terry Pratchett
6. The First Wives Club by Olivia Goldsmith
7. Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman: Exile by M.J. Friedman
8. The Black Swan by Mercedes Lackey
9. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
10. The Dark Side of the Sun by Terry Pratchett
11. One Good Knight by Mercedes Lackey
12. The Otherworld by Mercedes Lackey with Mark Shepherd and Holly Lisle
13. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
14. The Germanicus Mosaic by Rosemary Rowe
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15. Shakespeare Undead by Lori Handeland
16. The Mask of Ra by P.C. Doherty
17. A Baroque Fable by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
18. The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie R. King
19. Death of a Musketeer by Sarah D’Almeida
20. Murder in the North End by P.B. Ryan
21. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
22. Shaolin Rock Star by Mike Bryant
23. Supernatural: Nevermore by Keith R.A. DeCandido
24. Supernatural: John Winchester’s Journal by Alex Irvine
25. Sword & Sorceress XI edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley
26. An Unexpected Apprentice by Jody Lynn Nye
27. Reserved for the Cat by Mercedes Lackey
28. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith
29. Last Night at Chateau Marmont by Lauren Weisberger
30. Slaves of the Volcano God by Craig Shaw Gardner
31. Lois & Clark: A Superman novel by C.J. Cherryh
32. A Monstrous Regiment of Women by Laurie R. King
33. The Homeward bounders by Diana Wynne Jones
34. Fortune’s Fool by Mercedes Lackey
35. Supernatural: Bone Key by Keith R.A. DeCandido
36. Supernatural: Witch’s Canyon by Jeff Marriotte
37. Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher
38. Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris
39. Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
40. The Fairy Godmother by Mercedes Lackey
41. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
42. Supernatural: Heart of the Dragon by Keith R.A. DeCandido
43. Night Watch by Suzanne Brockmann
44. Evil? by Timothy Carter
45. Genuine Lies by Nora Roberts
46. To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
47. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
48. Attack of the Intergalactic Soul Hunters by Timothy Carter